Creator of the Unix Sysadmin Song explains he just wanted to liven up a textbook

In more than a few IT departments, or more likely in the pub on Friday night, there will be the ritual singing of the Unix Sysadmin Song, which is still remembered 28 years after its genesis in Harley Hahn's book, The Unix Companion. Hahn, who has sold over two million books in his career, explained that while the song might …

[Phil O'Sophical]

"There's a huge difference in how Windows has changed over the years from Windows 95 through to 10 – Unix doesn't change that much,"

I'd say that Unix has probably changed just as much as Windows, the difference is that unlike Windows, and Linux, the people working on Unix understand the concept of backwards compatibility. I had programs compiled on Solaris in 1992 that still ran on Solaris in 2020, even though Solaris had changed hugely.

[DeathStation 9000]

IMHO the bit of Solaris that makes it UNIX hasn't changed much over the years. The system calls I was taught on BSD at Poly in the late 80's still work fine on my Mac and even now a socket is still a socket. It's more the things built on top of that POSIX core have changed hugely over the years. And to be fair the Win32 API hasn't changed much over the years in the other camp, but the UI layer in Window keeps changing with the tides.

[david 12]

Oddly enough, the Windows system calls I learned in the early 90's still work find on my Win10 machine.

[Ian 55]

Not if they're in a 16-bit program.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, Solaris, where code generated by g++ used a different, and thus incompatible, ABi than Sun's compiler.

Where the OS assembler semantics on Intel were not the same as used on any other Intel OS (Intel's vs AT&T).

When the libc ABI version would not include all changes from lower versions (eg 1.23 would not have all the symbols from 1.22.8).

There's a lot to falk about compatibility on Solaris, for sure.

[DoContra]

Where the OS assembler semantics on Intel were not the same as used on any other Intel OS (Intel's vs AT&T).

Just like in pretty much every FLOSS compiler suite, if not every x86 *NIX ever? (to be fair, you can at least finagle gcc/gnu binutils -- and I'd expect the corresponding llvm alternatives -- to meet you in the middle generate/decompile to Intel order, but inline assembler still requires AT&T order)

[phuzz]

Microsoft care quite a lot about backward compatibility. After all, they want to sell new versions of their products to companies still using older applications. Here for example is a calculator program that will run on any (x86) Windows from 95 to 11 with the same binary.

If you're looking for a company that doesn't care about backwards compatibility, Apple is the one. They seem to deliberately change things to force people to upgrade.

[Bebu]

socket is still a socket...

Those of us that recall early Solaris 2 and sysV.4 it was't quite so. The socket interface wasn't directly implemented in the Unix kernel but a with a combination of Streams modules and user space libraries which didn't always work as expected compared with kernel bsd and sunos4 implementations.

The native sysv networking was tli / dlpi based - Steven Rago's (and W.Rich Steven's) books describe it quite nicely.

Nice to see G&S and Wodehouse get a mention as younger left pondians are almost certainly not to have encountered either.

Wodehouse got a fair bit of stick over from the time of his internment during WW2 which was featured in a "The Conversation" article recently. There was also an unpublished somewhat off-colour joke of his concerning a vicar and a crossword clue in four letters which completely broke me up. Sadly it appears to have been excised from the article.

[disgruntled yank]

Re: socket is still a socket...

Surely Tom Lehrer's Elements Song (recently placed by the author and performer in the public domain) will clue in the younger Left Pondians to Gilbert and Sullivan.

I have met a man not 40 who wrote his senior thesis on Wodehouse. My next-door neighbors, neither yet 40, and one a native of the US, were happy to accept a volume of Heinemann's The Great Sermon Handicap project that I wished to give away.

[that one in the corner]

Re: socket is still a socket...

> Surely Tom Lehrer's Elements Song (recently placed by the author and performer in the public domain) will clue in the younger Left Pondians to Gilbert and Sullivan.

The danger is that they'll wonder why the G&S society have changed the words from Lehrer's original.

Similar to David Bowie being congratulated for including a Nirvana[1] song in his sets (Bowie[2] got rather ticked off when that happened)

[1] The Man Who Sold The World

[2] autocorrect tried to change "Bowie" into "Unique", which I suppose is accurate.

[mmccul]

Re: socket is still a socket...

I am the very model of an animated individual (Animaniacs) I think will also help keep the song alive.

Of course there's ObXKCD: https://m.xkcd.com/1052/

[Blackjack]

Eh we aren't still using those to email programs, are we?

Eh Let me check...

Pine got replaced by Alpine.

Elm got two popular forks, that are still going strong.

So yes Unix has changed.

[Doctor Syntax]

I miss elm along with the days when you happily hang a dial-in modem off the back of a server. I had all the overnight jobs email status reports to me and could then log in from off-site to read them with a Nokia Communicator.

[Peter Gathercole]

I got along fine with using mailx for years, even after pine and elm came along, especially when the AT&T Toolchest version of mailx was made available outside of Bell Labs. (which would handle attachments, as long as you had a suitable handling program and mailcap configured).

What stopped me doing this was when more people started sending mails formatted as HTML than didn't, some not even deigning to provide a plain text version of the content. The person who thought HTML mail was a good idea should have been strangled st birth!

[Mishak]

The C++ Standard includes a limerick

Paragraph 7 of §17.7.3 (Explicit specialization) in C++17:

When writing a specialization, be careful about its location; or to make it compile will be such a trial as to kindle its self-immolation.

[Lil Endian]

You'll Regret It

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.

We’ll always have Parrot’s.

[My other car WAS an IAV Stryker]

Sysadmin songs

There's always Happy Sys Admin Day (or whatever it's called) by Canadian troupe Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie.

First introduced to me via User Friendly, Wes, Paul, Joe, and the others are a fine bunch of geek humor -- though the partnership lasted way too short.

[Ian 55]

You'll regret it

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.

Allowing systemd onto your kit summed up perfectly.